Hadroproduction of $t\,\bar{t}\,b\,\bar{b}$ final states at LHC: predictions at NLO accuracy matched with Parton Shower

TL;DR

This paper provides NLO QCD predictions for $t\bar{t}b\bar{b}$ production at the LHC, including parton shower effects, and assesses uncertainties and kinematic distributions relevant for experimental analyses.

Contribution

It offers the first matched NLO+PS predictions for $t\bar{t}b\bar{b}$ production at LHC energies, including decay effects and uncertainty estimates.

Findings

Parton shower and hadronization effects are moderate.

Heavy particle decay significantly impacts some distributions.

Uncertainty bands are only moderately affected by collision energy change.

Abstract

We present predictions for the hadroproduction of $t\bar{t}b\bar{b}$ final states at the LHC with collision energies $\sqrt{s}$ = 8TeV and 14TeV at NLO accuracy matched with parton shower, as obtained with PowHel+ PYTHIA. We quantify the effects of parton shower and hadronization. We find these are in general moderate except the effect of the decay of heavy particles, which can modify significantly some distributions, like that of the invariant mass of the two leading b-jets. We also show kinematic distributions obtained with cuts inspired to those recently employed by the CMS collaboration. For these predictions, we present the theoretical uncertainty bands, related to both scale and PDF variations. We find that these uncertainties are only moderately affected by the change of the collision energy.